Coaches’ Speak From the Week in the ACC


 

BOSTON COLLEGE COACH STEVE ADDAZIO: “Not really. I’m a big believer, always have been, the ACC’s got good players, okay? It’s a player-driven game. They got good players. I think the key is trying to get your players to match up to what their skill sets are. I think it’s critically important. I think we’ve got really good coaches in the ACC. I think the ACC right now is the most dominant conference in the country. I stand by that statement. I think we’ve got a lot of teams on the top that are just athletic and fast and can play with anybody. That’s what I see.”
 

LOUISVILLE HEAD COACH BOBBY PETRINO: (How much does it change play calling within a game when you see what Duke is trying to do and having a little bit of success at it?) “Well, the first thing I do is stay awake. That’s the first thing. That’s some boring stuff now. I’m just kidding. Kind of.”

COACH PETRINO: “I’ll be real honest with you. After our game, I don’t watch SportsCenter. I don’t turn on football. I don’t watch Remember the Titans or whatever that show is. You get a full fill of football here now and you go home, and I watch NCIS or something like that. You know, I get tired of it a little bit. You get a little break from it and you know and relax. Like the other night I went to the movie instead of staying home and watching some of those Saturday night football games. I went to the movie and watched the Accountant. I went and watched the Accountant, you know, one of them shoot them up kill them movies. So, it is pretty interesting though.”
 

MIAMI HEAD COACH MARK RICHT: On his lack of familiarity with Thursday night games… “The SEC will play some, but Georgia, in particular, played zero. It was just a presidential decision. I really think it’s wiser to have an open date prior to Thursday night, and after the game, obviously you’re not playing on Saturday so you have some time there. The five-day turnaround, in my opinion, I don’t think it’s very good, even though both teams are doing it. If you have one team with an open date, and one team with five days, that’s not fair. As far as what makes sense for TV, I’m sure it makes sense for TV. But what makes sense for the student-athletes? I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think it’s a bad idea.”
 

NORTH CAROLINA HEAD COACH LARRY FEDORA: On not being able to get a yard in a goal-line situation… “It’s frustrating. It really is and you start questioning the things you do; when really, you just need to knock some people off the ball and go get a yard. That’s all you really need to do. Don’t make it harder than it really is. You start doubting yourself call wise now that it’s happened a couple times in fourth down situations. You don’t get a chance to practice that much. Especially at this point in the season. You get inside against the defense in 10 minutes on a Tuesday and another 10 minutes on a Wednesday. You gotta get it done in that period of time.”
 

NORTH CAROLINA STATE HEAD COACH DAVE DOEREN: On fans being upset at Kyle Bambard… “I think I would just ask them to pretend that he’s their son for a minute. He’s a kid that’s trying to do the best that he can at that moment. He’s a kid that cares deeply about our team. And it wasn’t intentional. It was something we all wish was different, but to be negative to a kid like that, in my opinion, is, I just don’t get it. Hide behind your Twitter account and say stuff, I just don’t get it. But that’s the world we’re living in right now.”
 

SYRACUSE HEAD COACH DINO BABERS: On what a win like Saturday’s does for players’ confidence… “I think it was big. It starts with a lot of area. It starts with the administration. It starts with the University. It starts with the community. It starts with you guys in the media. You have something to hang your hat on. The line is drawn and you can go on one train or the other. That’s like everyone. There’s people who want to believe and then there’s nay-sayers. It’s human nature. This win let’s everyone know that we can get there. Regardless of what department or what community you’re living in. Now you just have to decide which side you want to be on and wait for the results.”
 

VIRGINIA HEAD COACH BRONCO MENDENHALL: “When I arrived I was talking about how long and how what I said is before a breakthrough, I didn’t know how long it would take or with whom, but at some point there would be a breakthrough. The intent breakthrough wasn’t a game. It was basically a program state. Meaning that winning consistently is the expectation. No matter where you play, who you play, that is just what is expected and what we’re used to, and that’s the Norm. So I find when I speak to the team, sometimes I talk to them like I’ve coached them for 11 years rather than almost one. So I have to backtrack sometimes and add context to some of the points of reference that I’m using. So, yeah, the breakthrough to me isn’t an event. It’s a State change, meaning almost like water going from a solid to a liquid or vice versa. It takes time and it’s noticeable, and then there’s a whole different place and a whole different thing that you’ve created.”
 

VIRGINIA TECH HEAD COACH JUSTIN FUENTE: On QB Jerod Evans stating that the team possibly didn’t bring enough energy on Saturday… “I think I would take everything our guys say with a grain of salt in terms of evaluating our team, whether it’s an X’s and O’s evaluation of the other team or an assessment of our mental state. We had good energy on the field. Our guys played hard. When we watched the film, they played with good toughness and great effort. As a whole, and that would be offensively, defensively, special teams, coaches and players, we didn’t execute at a level high enough to win the game. That is obvious, but I like our guys. Our guys were there for one reason, and that was to take care of business. We didn’t get that done, but we had emotion. We played hard.”
 

CLEMSON HEAD COACH DABO SWINNEY: “Well, I mean, I think you just keep playing. That’s all you can do. Obviously it was a frustrating day, like I said, we had the ball inside the five-yard line three times and got no points and that’s kind of a double-edged sword because we had long drives. We had 500 yards offense. We had 14-play drives, 13-play drives, 11-play drives and then you don’t get the pay dirt for it; so now you’ve taken a lot of time off and defensively, we put them in a bad spot, a couple field position — but we only gave up one touchdown.”
 

PITTSBURGH HEAD COACH PAT NARDUZZI: “You know what, I think it’s just coaches get all the credit for making all these great halftime adjustments. I think a lot of times those are overrated. It’s guys kind of knowing what they’re doing now, what did they do, what did they change, going into the game what can we do better. It’s really more of a matter of what we didn’t do as opposed to what we did in the second half. This game is not that complicated that we’ve got to go into halftime and make all these gigantic decisions as far as adjustments.”
 

GEORGIA TECH HEAD COACH JOHNSON: On bye weeks… “So you get extra time to prepare, you get extra time to heal up, yeah, there’s no question. You’d like to have an off week before you played everybody. I think most everybody, if I’m not mistaken, I believe most everybody in our division has had at least a week or a half a week or something before they play us. I could be wrong.”
 

FLORIDA STATE HEAD COACH JIMBO FISHER: On getting off to slow starts in games… “Always address that. But if you keep pressing it, sometimes it can make it worse. You just have got to practice — start practicing different ways, which we have, and get energy and create energy early in games. You’ve got to go out there and do that and just understand the energy. But there will be energy in this game I think from the get-go, because, I mean, of the rivalry and the importance of it and it’s just a big game and it will be a — it will be a great atmosphere. Just got to come out of the blocks and play well.”
 

WAKE FOREST HEAD COACH DAVE CLAWSON: On talking about becoming bowl eligible with his team… “Not at all. We don’t bring it up. We haven’t talked about it once to the team, and we’re not bowl eligible, so we haven’t won enough games yet to be bowl eligible, and the only way that we can accomplish that goal is that we take — we try to go 1-0 this next week. We have never put it in front of our team that, hey, our goal is to win six games. Our goal is to win the next game we play, and so far I think our team has done a great job of keeping that as their focus, and certainly we’re not going to change that.”
 

DUKE HEAD COACH DAVID CUTCLIFFE: On what he thought about their Louisville game plan… “Well, there were six and a half minutes left in the fourth quarter, and we’re down 17- 14, they’ve got the ball on their 20-yard line. We felt like at that point, we wanted to be ahead, obviously, but we thought that that was a game we needed a chance to win in the fourth quarter.”
 
 
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